Martha Abbott is currently the Director of Education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Prior to this, Marty served in the Fairfax County Public Schools as a language teacher, foreign language coordinator, and Director of High School Instruction. She has served on national committees to develop student standards, beginning teacher standards, and performance assessments in foreign languages. She was President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2003, Chair of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 1999, and President of the Foreign Language Association of Virginia in 1996. Marty also was co-chair of the national public awareness campaign 2005: The Year of Languages and now heads up ACTFL’s national public awareness campaign Discover Languages…Discover the World! She holds her B.A. degree in Spanish with a minor in Latin from the University of Mary Washington and a Master’s Degree in Spanish Linguistics from Georgetown University.

Dorothy Chun (Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics, UC Berkeley) is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Education at UC Santa Barbara. Her research areas include several aspects of Second Language Acquisition: L2 phonology and intonation, L2 reading and vocabulary acquisition, and technologies for the acquisition of language and intercultural communicative competence. She has conducted studies on cognitive processes in learning with multimedia and has authored CD-ROMs and websites for language and culture acquisition. Her publications include Discourse Intonation in L2: From Theory and Research to Practice, 2002, John Benjamins and articles in Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, System, CALL, Journal of Educational Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior, and the online journal, Language Learning and Technology, which she has edited since 2000.

Robert Fischer is Professor of French/Applied Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Texas State University. He has been serving as the Executive Director of the Computer-assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) and Editor of the CALICO Journal since 1997. He has published and given numerous presentations in computer-assisted language learning and has received several grants to support the development and dissemination of multimedia authoring tools. His current research interests lie in the relationship between student usage of computer-based materials and learning.

Tomas Hult is Associate Dean for Global Initiatives and Director of the Center for International Business Education and Research in the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. He is Professor of Marketing, International Business, and Strategic Management; member of the International Studies and Programs Executive Committee; MSU’s Dean’s Designee Committee on International Linkages; and MSU Deans Study Abroad Advisory Group. His international service has been recognized with the Richard Lewis Quality Award. Dr. Hult is Executive Director of the Academy of International Business. Previously, he served as Deputy Editor of Journal of International Business Studies and Vice President of International Activities of American Marketing Association. Dr. Hult is the author of four books and more than 100 articles. He holds Visiting Professorships at Copenhagen Business School and Leeds University. Professor Hult was the 75th most-cited “scientist in economics and business” in the world from 1997-2007 (per Thompson Reuters) with more than 4,500 citations, and is Editor of Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

Raji M. Rammuny is Professor of Arabic and Applied Linguistics and Director of the Arabic Flagship Program in the University of Michigan’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. His research interests span many fields, including Arabic grammatical theory, applied linguistics with focus on contrastive analysis, second language acquisition, material development, evaluation and testing, teacher training, and integration of multimedia into the language classroom. He has obtained several grants to develop textbooks for Modern Standard Arabic, and specialized materials for Business Arabic, Islamic Arabic, and Levantine Dialect. His most recent publications include Arabic for Communication: Interactive Multimedia Program and Advanced Arabic Communication Media. He serves as director of the M.A. program in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language and the MA in Arabic for Professional Purposes. He has received several fellowships and awards including the Amoco Good Teaching Award and LS&A Excellence in Education Award. In 2009 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Teachers of Arabic. He is past President and Board member of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and served as member of the Editorial Board of its journal, Al-Arabiyya.

Uli Schamiloglu (Ph.D., 1986, Columbia University) is Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he serves as chair of the Central Asian Studies Program and the Middle East Studies Program. He has also served as president of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages since 2003. His main research interests include the history of the Turkic languages, Turkic philology, the socio-economic history of the Middle East and Central Eurasia in the medieval period, the history of Turko-Islamic civilization, and modern intellectual movements among the Muslim Turkic peoples of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. He was principal investigator for a Title VI grant from the International Research and Studies Project of the U.S. Department of Education to support the “Central Asian Interactive Listening Series (CAILS)” at the UW-Madison (August 2006-July 2009) and he is currently principal investigator for a Title VI-A UISFL grant from the U.S. Department of Education to support the Middle East Studies Program at the UW-Madison (August 2008-July 2010).